In one version, it's a woman from Binzhou in China's Shandong Province carrying a large plastic bag inflated with natural gas, tapped from a pipeline near some oil and gas wells. It's an illicit hack with “many latent dangers.”

In another version, it's a woman from the coming era of radical sustainability carrying a large plastic bag inflated with methane gas. Filling for about a week or so at the Biogas Farm Co-op, a puffy orchard of wind-fluttered arboreal dirigibles, she's plucked it off the ground as though a fruit off a tree.

Instead of protecting Japan's coastal cities from tsunamis with massive seawalls, a strategy hardly foolproof as evidenced by the spectacular failure of the country's flood barriers during last year's disaster, why not concentrate all that concrete into tower blocks and resettle everyone on top? Instead of moving to higher grounds, you create higher grounds on the low-lying plains where people are too entrenched to consider a mass exodus.

Most islands will be used for residential purposes, with between 100 and 500 houses and apartments. Fuel stations, waste disposal and storage facilities, and car parks are on lower floors. Commercial islands, meanwhile, will house factories and processing facilities for industries such as fisheries and agriculture. As well as lifting residents high above the destructive power of the waves, the design comes with a number of safety features. A reinforced gate at the back of each island automatically closes after a tsunami warning, while steps up the sides let people climb to safety.

Clusters of these islands could thus form towns and cities.

(Image courtesy of Sako Architects.)

(Image courtesy of Sako Architects.)

Of course, one wonders what would happen if an even more devastating tsunami comes along and overtops these islands? Would people finally abandon the coast?

(Image courtesy of Sako Architects.)

While I normally advocate retreat and throw things at the wall whenever I hear the Army Corps of Engineers and entitled beach resort communities funneling billions of tax dollars into coastal fortifications, I am somewhat beguiled here by the image of these islands growing taller and bulkier every time a tsunami comes along, swelling much higher than the previous one due to accelerated sea level rise, and wipe everything in sight. From their original 3-story heights, they accrete each fresh batch of debris into gigantic stalagmites.

Extending this a bit further, perhaps we could imagine these islands growing still higher, tsunami or no tsunami. People will keep adding more and more elevations, not even stopping when they're safe from the reach of freak megatsunamis. Each new stratum will compel them to lay down a new layer. It's a kind of geo-pathology, incubated over all those decades of disaster-proofing their archipelagos. The islanders won't be able to resist such terraforming compulsion, and in only a few more decades, the coastal landscape of Japan will approximate the karst landscape of Guangxi.